"The Resurrection Days are over": Resurrection from Doctor Who to Torchwood
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 23140164
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.3138/jrpc.27.1.2620
- Title of journal
- Journal of Religion and Popular Culture
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 31
- Volume
- 27
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 1703-289X
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article examines the trope of resurrection in the BBC TV series Doctor Who (1963- ) and its spin-off, Torchwood (2006-2011).
Despite the critical popularity of Doctor Who, there has been little examination of the main character’s messianic capacity. Instead, it has fallen on Christian adherents and cultural commentators to examine the resurrective parallels, exploring the Doctor’s salvatory capability as a metaphor, albeit often a strained one, for Christ. This article uses close textual analysis and contextual material to explore how both the Doctor and Jack Harkness, the lead character in Torchwood, share an ability to transcend mortality. In contrast to the Doctor’s transformative regenerations, Harkness’s immortality is presented as an inability to die, a ‘surplus of alive’ that eradicates unconsciousness to the extent that he is incapable of sleep or death.
The simplistic metaphor of the Doctor as Christ, which has gained some traction among Christian adherents and has entered mainstream journalistic debates, becomes significantly eroded in the context of the unremitting secular humanism of the series. However, to a certain extent, this has accommodated analysis of the Doctor as a messianic figure, not a Christ metaphor so much as a Christ substitute.
The radical disconnect between how Doctor Who and Torchwood fixate on death and afterlife raises questions about canonical metaphysical continuity, and by accommodating such diametrically opposed visions of post-life states within the same mythos, the series has generated a postmodernist plurality of metaphysics that plunges certitudes such as mortality or humanity into a radical uncertainty. Ultimately the positivist narratives of Doctor Who propose a utopian existence in which wrongs, including death, can be reversed, whilst Torchwood suggests a dystopian and nihilist existence in which not only is death inevitable, but salvation through a viable afterlife is impossible, indeed meaningless.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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